序論　グローバルヒストリーから見た世界秩序の再考

抄録

This special issue on global history is the first attempt to introduce recent developments of global history to readers of International Relations, and to present ways of collaboration between historical studies and international relations. Global history aims to create new interpretations of ‘world history’ beyond national boundaries or a traditional framework of ‘national history’, and to explore mutual interactions of various regions and people on a global scale. ‘Comparison’ and ‘connectedness or relationship’ are two keys concepts in global history. At the forefront of global history studies now is the early-modern economic history, symbolized by debates on ‘the Great Divergence’ of Kenneth Pomeranz and the Californian School. The questions raised by them on the economic order in the early-modern period are concerned with comparative analyses of wider regions such as East Asia, Western Europe, or South Asia.

On the other hand, the global history on ‘the long nineteenth century’ explores the structural links of various regions within the modern world-system, especially to reveal a relatively unique ‘autonomous’ status of Asian regions in a capitalist world-economy. The works on ‘commodity chains’, which aim to clarify the linkages between production, processing, distribution, and consumption of specific goods (e.g., tea, sugar, coffee, cotton goods) and people, attracted intense attention from scholars. However, the most stimulating researches are those of Asian economic history, focused on mega-regions such as maritime Asia, or intra-regional trading links. These studies aim to overcome a European/Western-centred perspective based on a traditional framework of ‘Western-impact versus Asian responses’. The typical work is presented as the formation and development of ‘intra-Asian trade’ by Kaoru SUGIHARA. He shows us two unique features of Asian economic development at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries, that is, the emergence of ‘cotton-centred economic linkages’ on the supply side, and the effects of ‘final demand linkage’ on the demand side. These developments led to network analyses such as overseas Chinese merchants and Indian merchants, and globalizing of migration history.

On global history in the twentieth century, we may identify several unique works from Asian perspectives: the arguments of ‘National-Empire’ (Kokumin-Teikoku) by YAMAMURO Shinichi, the hegemonic and structural power of the British Empire and Asian economic development by myself, and Asian developmentalism in the 1960-80s with coexistence of the Cold-War regime by SUEHIRO Akira. Through these studies in the wider context of global history, which utilize methods of relational (or connected) history, especially from Asian perspectives, we may present original interpretations on global/world history, and elicit further collaboration between historical studies, area studies and international relations.